Sometime shame is a shitpile: Like when you become suicidal after getting rejected from your top-choice school. Or when you stop seeing friends entirely because your suffering screenwriter budget won’t allow you to fine dine. Or when your cheerleading coach logs into your Facebook account and airs your dirty laundry with the students and staff, exposing you to years of ridicule. Or when your baby papa leaves you when you’re seven months pregnant for a younger, longer-necked actress. Or when your mother disowns you because you’ve dishonored the family by moving in with a boyfriend/marrying outside of your race/having a baby out of wedlock.

But man, sometimes shame is absolutely good and necessary. It’s the stuff that, properly applied, keeps people from gallivanting with party gals in the south of France while their eight toddlers sit at home. Or from jerking their man’s junk on a hotel balcony for the delight of the paparazzi. Or self-destructing entirely at clubs, parties and Robertson Boulevard as if doing performance art for the blogosphere.

Everyone once in awhile, though, shame is simply complicated.

Recently, a married man in Wisconson with a handful of girlfriends found himself at the center of an ugly coup, hosted by all of his disgruntled lovers.

WAUSAU, Wis. — A married man who planned to rendezvous with one of his handful of lovers at an eastern Wisconsin motel instead found himself bound, blindfolded and assaulted by a group of women out for revenge, according to court documents.

Four women, including his wife, eventually showed up to humiliate the man, who ended up with his penis glued to his stomach in a bizarre plot to punish him for a lover’s quadrangle gone bad, according to the documents filed in Calumet County.

The women involved now face time in the clink for their shameful acts. But let’s talk about everyone involved, and who’s to shame here, for a second:

There’s the dude, who carelessly juggled the women in his life (including the one he exchanged holy vows with) as if they were oranges and not people, which is bullshit. And he ended up catching a beatdown for it, with his wiener glued his gut. Should be ashamed? Definitely. Was the attack on him unacceptable? Yes. But isn’t it kinda hilarious? Sorry, but kinda. I mean hell, it’s not like they cut the fucking thing off…

Then there’s the wife, the true cuckold of the story. No, it wasn’t a good idea for her to get involved in this sick scenario, but her husband was piling at least three other chicks, for crying out loud. It’s humiliating and scarring. She’s not excused, but she certainly had a leg to stand on. Also, I’ve got to give her mad props for getting in cahoots with the ladies to challenge the true adulterer, instead of lashing out at them (they, after all, never put a ring on her finger).

Lastly are the girlfriends, who found themselves subjugated to not only being “the other woman,” but “one of the other women.” What a demotion! The interesting thing about these ladies is the variety of their shame, which I feel might only really be present because they all got caught.

One certainly has her tail between her legs, if only to soften the blow of her reprimand:

“I am disturbed. I am upset. I am having a hard time handling life; an emotional wreck,” Wendy Sewell, 43, of Kaukauna, said in a telephone interview from her home. “I am ashamed.”

But sometimes photos tell a different story. Sewell’s counterpart, “an-other woman” Michelle Belliveau, seems to say it all in her mug shot:

“Yeah, I Krazy Glued his dick. And I’d do it again to the little fucker!!!”